HKEPC has posted a very interesting slide that they got their hands on which clears up a lot of the current confusion with regards to what is going on in the world of Intel's Atom processor. With the recent introduction of the N280 processor and the details of the Asus Eee PC with the GN40 chipset, it seemed like Intel was going next gen a bit too early, but it doesn't seem to be the case now.

The Atom N280 is simply nothing more than a speed bump over the N270, although with a faster bus speed. The next generation Atom processor will be the Pineview which should launch later this year, our guess is at Computex in early June. The N280 can either be paired up with the old 945GSE chipset in what Intel calls an off-roadmap solution to gives its partners a differentiating factor and a small performance bump.

However, the N280 can also be paired up with the GN40 chipset for a second off-roadmap solution which Intel calls Enhanced Media Netbooks and accordingly, this solution gives the Atom platform HD video playback capability. Interestingly we had one of our readers contacting us a while back saying that the GN40 chipset is simply a re-badged GL40 chipset which is a cost down version of the mobile GM45 chipset without support for an external graphics solution.

We're not sure if Intel has disabled features of the GL40 chipset for the Atom platform and thus gave it the GN40 name to make it easier to tell the difference between the two. The GL40 chipset has a TDP of 12W and it seems like the GN40 is very similar, as the N280 combined with the GN40 offers a total TDP of 16.5W which is more than double that of either of the Atom processors paired up with the 945GSE chipset.

We're not sure if the battery life trade-off will be worth it despite the fact that the GN40 chipset offers support for VC-1 and H.264 video decoding at 720p and 1080p as well as improved graphics performance. For those wanting these features as well as a low power solution will have to wait for the Pine Trail-M platform to launch, as the Pineview CPU paired up with the Tigerpoint chipset is meant to have a TDP of 1W less than the current Atom platform at a total TDP of 7W.

You can find the slide here